Devil Guard: The Beast of the West 镇魔司：西域异兽
7.0
7.0
The story begins as the demon hunters assemble an expedition to the western lands, where the barbarian king Chinu Haer has run rampant. The newcomers Hua Wuchang, Xiao Zhen and Ning Umou manage to join the squad by what is practically a miracle, and by a miracle they survive after the hunters fall into an ambush set by Chinu Haer and the sorceress Gu Niantong, who aids him. Despite the expedition's defeat, Hua Wuchang wants to finish what was started, and in this she may be helped by Chinu Haer's sister, Chinu Aimu, who is certain that her tribe must end its campaign of conquest and settle somewhere in a peaceful corner. All the more so since her brother, under Gu Niantong's influence, is gradually turning into a bloodthirsty demon.
The first two installments of Devil Guard, released in 2018 and 2019, were among the breakthrough films that helped Chinese online cinema make a qualitative leap. Director Huo Sui-Qiang showed that a modest budget is no death sentence even in the fantasy-action genre, and that what matters most is the talent of the filmmakers combined with a genuine desire to make crowd-pleasing cinema. In The Beast of the West, Huo attempted to reboot the franchise, filming not a sequel to the second film but a prequel to the first – the story of how the original quartet of demon hunters came together, and how the squad commander Xiao Zhen received his gift of turning into a demon.
In the second installment, the creators of the cycle made several cast adjustments, redirecting, in particular, Tempo Zhang, who played Ning Wumou in the first film, to a different character. In The Beast of the West, Huo Sui-Qiang went further and replaced virtually all the key stars, keeping only Xia Mo in place as the sorceress Gu Niantong. The threequel-prequel certainly hasn't suffered in terms of acting prowess, but viewers may get confused – though for the Chinese, for instance, there's nothing unusual about that. One need only recall the Detective Dee film series, where it's baked in almost at the conceptual level that the title character is always played by different actors.
On Chinese film sites, this installment has the lowest ratings in the entire franchise, but mainly because, having replaced the actors, the creators decided to tweak their characters' personalities as well, turning Ning Wumou, for example, into an outright clown. In the broader sense, though, The Beast of the West is barely inferior to the other films in the cycle, and visually it actually stands out pleasantly thanks to its unusual "barbarian" setting. On top of that, the film has a very striking main villain who is more memorable than the heroes' adversaries in the previous installments, and his younger sister, who commands giant wolves, evokes fond associations with the Princess Mononoke of Hayao Miyazaki's animated film of the same name.
On the whole, it's the same Devil Guard as before – a stylish adventure fantasy-action film, a little more convoluted and complex than you'd expect from an online movie, yet no longer building some parallel world but fully deepening and inhabiting it. It's just a shame that this course didn't extend to the character of Gu Niantong – the seductive sorceress with her tale of dark love was the chief adornment of the second installment, but in The Beast of the West she is decidedly lacking in dimension – we already know she is bigger and more interesting than a mere cunning witch-manipulator.
7.0
7.0
